The BW job facing Tyrangiel

Marion Manekar of The Big Money writes Monday about incoming BusinessWeek editor Josh Tyrangiel and what he must to do turn around the magazine’s financial performance.

Manekar writes, “On the execution side lies Tyrangiel’s ease at dealing with difficult personalities. With a complex mix of editors — Pearlstine, Winkler, and former Time managing editor Jim Kelly — all floating around in the new BusinessWeek stew, Tyrangiel’s positive energy and lack of pretension may be one of his biggest assets.

“Where BusinesWeek goes from here will be a litmus test for magazines and media. The Bloomberg team swears by the magazine and says they plan to invest in it heavily. The imperatives of the 21^st century surely mean they will take another run at figuring out BusinessWeek.com. And despite Tyrangiel’s lack of formal credentials as a business journalist, he had tremendous success in building Time.com’s Web traffic over a few years. (Of course, he had corporate access to the CNN.com juggernaut for help.)

“Time’s great limitation was its cultural baggage as a weekly magazine. No matter how much Time.com changed the organization’s metabolism, it would always be thought of by readers as a weekly. BusinessWeek, on the other hand, gets a new lease on life if it can fuse Bloomberg’s reputation as an instant-information service with BusinessWeek’s reputation as a trend-watching guide.

“To paraphrase the old candy bar commercial, they’re going to take two great tastes and make them taste great together — like peanut butter and chocolate.”

Read more here.